Leonid Hurwicz's Game

“I experienced harassment during this period.” Hurwicz pauses, as if remembering. “But I never was beaten or attacked personally. And with my professors, I felt no discrimination.”

He graduated from Warsaw University in 1938 with a degree in law, intending to follow in his father’s footsteps. However, beginning in his second year of law school, he’d taken economics courses and became more interested in this discipline than any other.

“I had the belief that many troubles you could observe on the European continent were due to politicians not understanding economic phenomena,” Hurwicz says. “Even if they had good intentions, they didn’t have the skills to solve problems.”

"I had the belief that many troubles you could observe on the European continent were due to politicians not understanding economic phenomena."

Hitler was in power in Germany and Jews all across Eastern Europe were on guard—made to feel like intruders in their own countries, hearing hideous rumors about persecution they could not fathom but nevertheless feared. Hurwicz’s father, sensing the changing tides, suggested that his older son apply to the London School of Economics rather than set up a law practice at home.

Leo went to London in the fall of ’38, but due to unrest in Europe and a sudden surge in Jewish émigrés, the British refused to extend his visa. So Hurwicz went to France and then Switzerland. He arrived in Geneva on August 25, 1939—less than a week before Germany attacked and occupied western Poland, including Warsaw. Hurwicz heard the news, but didn’t know that his parents and brother had been arrested and taken to a labor camp in Arctic Russia. He spent months in Geneva, enrolled part time as a student, living off what little money he had left, and waiting for a letter from his family telling him what to do.